Route 9A Emergency Reconstruction

The ripples of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks spread far beyond the World Trade Center site.

One sector sustaining heavy damage was transportation-including the Route 9A corridor in Lower Manhattan that links Battery Park City and the World Financial Center to the rest of the city.

Reopening that segment of West Street turned out to be a major effort because of the massive scale of cleanup and an emergency schedule for road reconstruction. But the $5 million job was a success-with the road reopening in just six months.

The New York State Department of Transportation assembled a team of agencies and contractors to take on coordination, planning, difficult logistics and a rapid timetable.

Primary challenges in the three-month cleanup phase involved creating alternate work areas for WTC site-recovery traffic, reconnecting and relocating utilities and securing project funding.

The jury cited those multiple tasks, with one member saying: "This was a usual highway job made unusual by the complexity of the utility work. If operation was lost at any time, there were significant consequences. This was logistically difficult and a very impressive job."

A major early focus was creating work areas and facilitating debris removal. With Pier 25 designated for barge loading of debris, the project's civil engineers created a temporary haul road by replacing and paving over part of an existing bikeway.

This allowed trucks to proceed directly to the barge transfer site without using the 9A roadway. The project team also paved over a parcel west of Route 9A and north of Pier 25 to create a staging area for WTC rescue, recovery, security and support services.

As WTC cleanup operations continued, the project team took on the second three-month phase-designing and constructing a six-lane interim roadway for Route 9A traffic that included temporary bridges, sidewalks and crosswalks.

First, the team needed to complete an order-of-magnitude cost estimate in order to qualify for Federal Emergency Management Administration funds. That meant it had to inventory Route 9A from the Battery Tunnel to 59th Street to determine the needs for reopening and restoring the road to its prior condition.

After securing the federal funds, the team chose an alignment for the six-lane interim roadway that balanced traffic needs with the recovery operation's cranes, temporary utilities and work areas for the crews. The potential alignment also had to plan around the WTC site's "bathtub" retainer wall.

The engineers mapped an alignment that met all of those needs, while also avoiding encroachment on Battery Park City's commercial center, bridging over PATH train structures, preserving the temporary haul road and ultimately restoring Route 9A between Chambers Street and the Battery Tunnel.

Another key project success was quickly replacing damaged infrastructure-including water mains, telephone lines, drainage and electric conduits-by integrating those new utilities into the overall construction plan for the interim roadway.

Construction proceeded on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week schedule. It required vast coordination among agencies and teams installing sidewalks, crosswalks, temporary bridges, traffic lights and roadway lighting.

That coordination included the New York City departments of transportation and design and construction, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Battery Park City Authority and various other city and state agencies.